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Week on, Week off schedule

  • October 31, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 293 views
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I would like to create a rotation schedule that is only active on alternate weeks.

Week 1 : Person 1
Week 2 : Inactive
Week 3 : Person 2
Week 4 : Inactive

I can easily create gaps inside of a week using restrictions, so this would be easy to do:

1st Half of Week 1 : Person 1
2nd Half of Week 1: Inactive
1st Half of Week 2: Person 2
2nd Half of Week 2: Inactive

But I cant figure out Week On, Week Off. Is there a way other than restrictions I’m missing?

(I realize I could add a dummy account to fill in for the inactive weeks, I would prefer not to do that)

Best answer by lupimiguel

Hi ​@foragerr,

How are you doing today?

PagerDuty’s native scheduling features don’t currently support a true “week on, week off” rotation with inactive weeks (i.e., no one on call) without using a workaround. The most common workaround is to add a “dummy” or “nobody” user to the schedule for the inactive weeks. This “nobody” user would have no contact information or notification rules, so no one is actually paged during those weeks. However, this does use up a seat license, which is understandably not ideal for many teams.

You can see this example here in the forums where this workaround was used:
Schedule with Weekly Rotation and different time requirements for each week

I’ll try to check internally if we have any upcoming feature or enhancement that addresses this in the roadmap.

Hope this helps clarify things, even if it’s not the answer you were hoping for!

Thank you and have a nice day!

2 replies

lupimiguel
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  • lupimiguel
  • Community Manager 💚
  • Answer
  • May 7, 2025

Hi ​@foragerr,

How are you doing today?

PagerDuty’s native scheduling features don’t currently support a true “week on, week off” rotation with inactive weeks (i.e., no one on call) without using a workaround. The most common workaround is to add a “dummy” or “nobody” user to the schedule for the inactive weeks. This “nobody” user would have no contact information or notification rules, so no one is actually paged during those weeks. However, this does use up a seat license, which is understandably not ideal for many teams.

You can see this example here in the forums where this workaround was used:
Schedule with Weekly Rotation and different time requirements for each week

I’ll try to check internally if we have any upcoming feature or enhancement that addresses this in the roadmap.

Hope this helps clarify things, even if it’s not the answer you were hoping for!

Thank you and have a nice day!

mwalls
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  • mwalls
  • Community Manager 💚
  • June 24, 2026

Hi Everyone! 

This is a great schedule question from ​@foragerr  that now works much easier with our new Shift-Based Schedules.

As we mentioned above, using a dummy user is a way to make this work, but used to use a seat on your account. With shift-based schedules, we’ve added support for an Unassigned user, so you can create these kinds of schedules to use in your escalation policies.

For this schedule, we’d set it up this way:

  • Create a new schedule with a name, description, and team(s), and select Custom
  • Create a rotation with the settings you prefer for timezone, days of the week, hours, etc
  • Select “Every 1 week” for the Handoff
  • On the Members tab, add your team and the Unassigned user in the order you want
  • Save the rotation and the schedule

Your Members tab will look something like this:

So your calendar looks like this:

You can still customize the on-call hours and the handoff day like you could in the prior schedules.

Hope that makes things easier on folks! If you have your own schedules question, add it to the forums and we’ll see how we can make it work!

--mandi

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